Rick Santorum Goes Home

On the day when Rick Santorum’s youngest child, Bella, was released from the hospital, he released himself from the madhouse whirligig of the Republican primary campaign. He stood at the press conference—in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania—with his wife, two older daughters, and two sons, and said that he was getting out. He never quite said that it had become impossible for him as a candidate—he talked about how he’d won “millions of voters, millions of votes” (a little more than three million, in fact), eleven states, “and more counties than anyone else in this race combined”—or as a father. He did say that Good Friday, given Bella’s dire medical condition, had been “a Passion play for us.” She has been ill since she was born; she was now doing better, and he said that he loved seeing signs saying, “I’m for Bella’s Dad.” But her latest illness made him and his wife think. More than a year ago, he said, “We made the decision over the kitchen table to get into the race, against the odds,” and the decision to “suspend” his campaign had been made in the same room, at the same table. He didn’t need to say that this time, the odds were very much in favor of what he was doing.

And with that, he released the rest of us, too. We haven’t been left alone in the room with Romney quite yet—Newt and Ron Paul are still lurking in the corners—and “suspending,” rather than just quitting, means that Santorum keeps his two hundred and eighty-five delegates (he could even win another state). There will probably be some braying from the general direction of Gingrich, even though he admitted to Fox News over the weekend that his campaign was more than four million dollars in debt. But we have a winner. The Romney campaign let reporters know even before today’s press conference that they had gotten a call from the Santorum campaign. (“I know that Rick is open to a meeting”; “we’ll get them together soon.”) Santorum was also—perhaps most—important as a gauge of Romney’s weakness. This was true in a general sense (the latest not-Romney) and a more finely tuned one (how bad was Mitt’s evangelical problem? See: Mississippi and Alabama). Now we’ll see what Mitt can do with Santorum the not-candidate. There was no endorsement at the press conference.

Santorum talked about telling “my story—our story—of my family,” how he’d “carried around our copy of the Constitution” (and how much the Tea Party loved that), and all the good things he’d done for a small, scrappy, manufacturer of American-made sweater vests. Is there anything else that’s left from his campaign, other than the catalogue of absurdities in the Republican debates? (Rick’s lowest moment: silence during the jeering of a gay Marine serving in Iraq.)

Santorum says that he was proud of having turned the discussion to “the moral enterprise of this America.” What falls under that rubric? Saying that he was sickened by Kennedy’s words on maintaining some distinction between the religious and the political; accusing the President of waging a war on religion, specifically on Catholics; questions about what it means to be a working woman in this country—the way he pulled the parameters of that discussion will not make things easy for Romney in the general election. More than that, the policies those pronouncements imply do not make it easy for ordinary Americans trying to manage their lives. There may be an ugly residue.

Is it all realistic to hope that his extreme positions might retreat with his campaign? If so, perhaps the nastiness of the real Santorum campaign will be replaced by a fuzzy image of a father talking about his daughter. If all that Santorum leaves behind a general sense that family is important, and that Republicans do not consist entirely of people with a deep appreciation of the work of Bain Capital, perhaps he may yet do the G.O.P. some good.

There is no reason to doubt that home and family were a big part of this decision. For Santorum, home is not only the place where his kitchen is, but the state of Pennsylvania. One of the angry things other candidates threw at Santorum was the reminder of how badly he had lost—in his own state!—the last time he ran for senator. (Newt, whose own party reprimanded him in Congress, had a way of sort of sneering that line out.) The race was tight in Pennsylvania. It’s a good guess that he didn’t want to go back home to a lose a primary. So he just decided to go home.

Photograph by Jeff Swensen/The New York Times.

Amy Davidson Sorkin is a New Yorker staff writer. She is a regular Comment contributor for the magazine and writes a Web column, in which she covers war, sports, and everything in between.